With Mothers Who Can't Love: A Healing Guide for Daughters, Susan Forward, Ph.D., author of the smash #1 best-seller Toxic Parents, offers a powerful look at the devastating impact unloving mothers have on their daughters - and provides clear, effective techniques for overcoming that painful legacy.

Will I Ever Be Good Enough?: Healing the Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers

The first book specifically for daughters suffering from the emotional abuse of selfish, self-involved mothers, Will I Ever Be Good Enough? provides the expert assistance you need in order to overcome this debilitating history and reclaim your life for yourself.

Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents: How to Heal from Distant, Rejecting, or Self-Involved Parents

In this breakthrough book, clinical psychologist Lindsay Gibson exposes the destructive nature of parents who are emotionally immature or unavailable. You will see how these parents create a sense of neglect and discover ways to heal from the pain and confusion caused by your childhood. By freeing yourself from your parents' emotional immaturity, you can recover your true nature, control how you react to them, and avoid disappointment. Finally, you'll learn how to create positive new relationships so you can build a better life.

The Narcissistic Family: Diagnosis and Treatment

In this compelling book, the authors present an innovative therapeutic model for understanding and treating adults from emotionally abusive or neglectful families - families the authors call narcissistic. Narcissistic families have a parental system that is, for whatever reason (job stress, alcoholism, drug abuse, mental illness, physical disability, lack of parenting skills, self-centered immaturity), primarily involved in getting its own needs met. The children in such narcissistic family systems try to earn love.

Narcissistic and toxic mothers are often injured in their childhoods by their own stunted emotional development. In order to fully develop into a healthy adult, we need a very nurturing and emotionally validating environment. Toxic and narcissistic mothers often grow up without that nurturing. They have jumped through hoops and tailored themselves to others around them. They have been invited to be a part of mind games, lies, and manipulation. They may have been told repeatedly that they weren't wanted.

The Emotionally Absent Mother: A Guide to Self-Healing and Getting the Love You Missed

Was your mother too busy, too tired, or too checked out to provide you with the nurturing you needed as a child? Men and women who were "undermothered" as children often struggle with intimate relationships, in part because of their unmet need for maternal care.

Trapped in the Mirror: Adult Children of Narcissists in Their Struggle for Self

The difficulties experienced by adult children of narcissists can manifest themselves in many ways - for example, physical self-loathing that takes the form of overeating, anorexia, or bulimia; a self-destructive streak that causes poor job performance and rocky personal relationships; or a struggle with the self that is perpetuated in the adult's interaction with his or her own children. These dilemmas are both common and correctable, Elan Golomb tells us.

Children of the Self-Absorbed: A Grown-Up's Guide to Getting Over Narcissistic Parents

Being a parent is usually all about giving of yourself to foster your child's growth and development. But what happens when this isn't the case? Some parents dismiss the needs of their children, asserting their own instead, demanding attention and reassurance from even very young children. This may especially be the case when a parent has narcissistic tendencies or narcissistic personality disorder.

Adult Children: The Secrets of Dysfunctional Families

It is estimated that as many as 34 million people grew up in alcoholic homes. But what about the rest of us? What about families that had no alcoholism, but did have perfectionism, workaholism, compulsive overeating, intimacy problems, depression, problems in expressing feelings, plus all the other personality traits that can produce a family system much like an alcoholic one? Countless millions of us struggle with these kinds of dysfunctions every day, and until very recently we struggled alone.

Stop Caretaking the Borderline or Narcissist: How to End the Drama and Get On with Life

People with borderline or narcissistic personality disorders have a serious mental illness that primarily affects their intimate, personal, and family relationships. Often they appear to be normally functioning at work and in public interactions, and narcissists may even be highly effective, in the short term, in some work or social situations. However, in intimate relationships, they can be emotional, aggressive, demeaning, illogical, paranoid, accusing, and controlling - in the extreme.

Surviving a Borderline Parent: How to Heal Your Childhood Wounds and Build Trust, Boundaries, and Self-Esteem

Although relatively common, borderline personality disorder (BPD) is often overlooked or misdiagnosed by therapists and clinicians and denied by those who suffer from it. If you were raised by a BPD parent, your childhood was a volatile and painful time. This book, the first written specifically for children of borderline parents, offers step-by-step guidance to understanding and overcoming the lasting effects of being raised by a person suffering from this disorder.

Childhood Disrupted: How Your Biography Becomes Your Biology, and How You Can Heal

The emotional trauma we suffer as children not only shapes our emotional lives as adults but also affects our physical health and overall well-being. Scientists now know on a biochemical level exactly how parents' chronic fights, divorce, death in the family, being bullied or hazed, and growing up with a hypercritical, alcoholic, or mentally ill parent can leave permanent, physical "fingerprints" on our brains.

The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

Never before has world-renowned psychoanalyst Alice Miller examined so persuasively the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the body. Using the experiences of her patients along with the biographical stories of literary giants such as Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, and Marcel Proust, Miller shows how a child's humiliation, impotence, and bottled rage will manifest itself as adult illness - be it cancer, stroke, or other debilitating diseases.

Difficult Mothers: Understanding and Overcoming Their Power

Using the newest research on human attachment and brain development, Terri Apter, an internationally acclaimed psychologist and writer, unlocks the mysteries of this complicated bond. She showcases the five different types of difficult mother - the angry mother, the controlling mother, the narcissistic mother, the envious mother, and the emotionally neglectful mother - and explains the patterns of behavior seen in each type.

The psychopath carefully selects the most indifferent and heartbreaking way imaginable to abandon you. They destroy you as a way to reassure themselves. Psychopath Free will help you out of the darkness so that you can begin making better choices that will forever alter the course of your life. So say farewell to love triangles, cryptic letters, self-doubt, and manufactured anxiety. You are no longer a pawn in the mind games of a psychopath. You are free.

Who's Pulling Your Strings?: How to Break the Cycle of Manipulation and Regain Control of Your Life

Millions of people, both men and women, can become involved in relationships with manipulators, people who control through emotional manipulation, insults, and mind games. These "toxic" relationships erode self-esteem and make life miserable for the victim.

Becoming the Narcissist's Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself

Although clinical research has been conducted on narcissism as a disorder, less is known about its effects on victims who are in toxic relationships with partners with Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Individuals with this disorder engage in chronic devaluation and manipulation of their partners, a psychological and emotional phenomenon known as "narcissistic abuse". Unfortunately, the full extent of what narcissistic abuse entails is not taught in any psychology class or diagnostic manual.

It Wasn't Your Fault: Freeing Yourself From the Shame of Childhood Abuse with the Power of Self-Compassion

Shame is one of the most destructive of human emotions. If you suffered childhood physical or sexual abuse, you may experience such intense feelings of shame that it almost seems to define you as a person. In order to begin healing, it's important for you to know that it wasn't your fault. In this gentle guide, therapist and childhood abuse expert Beverly Engel presents a mindfulness and compassion-based therapeutic approach to help you overcome the debilitating shame that keeps you tied to the past.

Do you have intense emotional or physical reactions after spending time with your parents?

Do your parents control you with threats or guilt?

Do they manipulate you with money?

Do you feel that no matter what you do, it's never good enough for your parents?

In this remarkable self-help guide, Dr. Susan Forward draws on case histories and the real-life voices of adult children of toxic parents to help you free yourself from the frustrating patterns of your relationship with your parents---and discover a new world of self-confidence, inner strength, and emotional independence.

I read this book thinking about my parents who were clearly toxic but dare I say they were so toxic this book wasn't helpful. I think this book would be most helpful for individuals who have living parents that have personality disorders, but are still somewhat functional. Those with deceased parents or those with so severely limited parents that there is no hope of them understanding or approving of you, may not gain much from this book.

While I critize this book for not being able to help me personally in relationship to my own parents. I did gain a lot of insight from this book in respect to other individuals that I know again with personality disorders. Their behaviors I didn't fully accept/understand and I think I do following this book. Furthermore this book's section on getting in touch with your anger made me realise that I have been surpressing some anger I literally had no idea was still there.

So my thoughts are that this book is amazing. I didn't get what I had hoped from it, but it did provide meaningful insight. If you come from a disfunctional home or know people closely who came from a disfuctional home I highly recommend this book. I just think you should give yourself the time and space to read it.

Where does Toxic Parents rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

I have read many, many books on this "topic" seeking for a way to clear out my junk from the past. This one is the best and most helpful one I have EVER encountered! I wish I had known about it sooner but Im guessing these things only come to you when you're ready for them. This negates years of the torture from the guilt and shame of putting accountability where it belongs and clarifies how healing my past and the hell I endured is in my hands and at my comfort level without concern for reactions of the perpetrators. I highly recommend this one. If you're drawn to this one then buy it. Worth every penny and then some. <3

I never thought of my parents as toxic. I thought they had the right to tease me and punish me physically as a child and to manipulate and control me as an adult because they were my parents. Consequently, I have been depressed most of my life . I am so thankful to have heard this book. The stories with dialogue from Susan and her clients made the book fascinating to read. The voice actor did an excellent job too. It will be a good companion to the therapy that I am in now. I can finally heal and work towards being an independent whole adult.

I'm not a wide reader; especially not a self help book enthusiast. But once I got past the extreme title (it took a while), my emotions eased into this book like it's a cup of perfectly warmed up milk comforting me at age 8. It helped me validate my suspicions that I wasn't in a healthy relationship with my loving and overly protective parent. It helped me identify that the brand of love I've received has not all been for my better good. It has freed me to see that it's ok to form my opinion about all this despite how other unknowing people around us would tend to dispute my analysis. In time, I hope to have a truly loving and healthy relationship before it's too late.

Forward covers a lot of ground here and gives a lot of practical advice. I wish Toxic In-Laws and Emotional Blackmail were also available on audio.I do feel, personally, that Forward was a bit soft in her relative lack of encouragement for "divorcing" toxic parents. I mean, if you can go so far as to call someone TOXIC, the implication is that even a small dose of them is detrimental to one's wellness. Also, any person who was raised by toxic parents has been systematically trained from day one of life to be a victim, so staying in relationship with said toxic parent(s) seems like an uphill battle of epic proportions--a lose/lose situation. I realize that many people hearing/reading this book are dealing with abusive parents who are not necessarily TOXIC, but the title states what the book is supposed to be about.But it's a great book.